Livesuit
Background
Livesuit infantry are the most effective soldiers in the war against the Carryx and their allied species. They wear powered combat suits that are permanently bonded to the human body - the suits were never designed to come off. In exchange for almost invulnerable combat capability, the soldiers’ bodies and identities become increasingly entangled with the suit over time. The suit manages their pain, pumps drugs to sustain function, and heals damage that would kill an unaugmented soldier. What happens when the human body inside is fully replaced by suit material is a question the story answers slowly and in the dark.
Protagonist: Kirin Foss, a livesuit soldier of unspecified years of service.
Section 1 - The River Mission, Kirin’s Ankle
The opening is action: Kirin is in the water, swimming toward an alien infrastructure target with an explosive charge strapped to his shoulder. His strike team - Corval (squad leader), Piotr, Noor, Gleaner, Ross - is spread across the objective. Something in the mud closes on his ankle like a mouth. The small bones grind against each other. His suit immediately floods him with anesthetics. The pain becomes an intellectual awareness rather than a screaming panic - he knows he’s injured but doesn’t feel it. He cuts at the thing holding him. Something deep in his ankle rips, punching through the fog anyway, and he screams. The explosive charge slides off his shoulder. He lets it go.
“I’m down. Corval, I’m down.” He is pulled from the river.
Section 2 - Before the Suit: Kaladon
A flashback break. Time dilation is a property of the brane-slip engines they use to traverse interstellar distances - by one reckoning, Kirin saw the news eight years before. By another, forty. For him the question has become meaningless. There is before and there is after, and trying to make sense of the duration between them is a fast track to madness.
Before, it had been a sun-soaked day at the end of spring on Kaladon. Birds sang in the pines. The clouds were swirls of green and orange and gold that seemed to tower to the edge of space. He was twenty-three. The world had a temperature and a smell, and his body reported these things directly instead of through a layer of sensor data.
He doesn’t dwell there long.
Section 3 - The In-Suit Recruitment Interface
The suit’s morale and retention systems present Kirin with choices:
Congratulations. or It’s been a good run.
The choices are mock prompts from a reenlistment and morale management system embedded in the suit’s interface - gamified propaganda that frames the war as a series of choices the soldier makes freely. The formatting of the text in the story (brief, capitalised fragments, centered on the page) shows the system as both mundane and sinister: it is so thoroughly integrated into the soldier’s experience that they navigate reenlistment decisions the same way they navigate target acquisition.
Section 4 - Simeon, and What He Can No Longer Ask
Simeon was Kirin’s team leader. Simeon is dead. It happened during one of the missions - the story circles the fact without landing on it, the way memory circles a wound it isn’t ready to probe. At critical moments, Kirin catches himself waiting for Simeon’s next order, then remembers why he won’t hear it. Hamze and Jones are also gone. The team he started with has been replaced, one by one, until the familiar voices are all on data-blocked reassignment channels he can’t reach.
He misses them the way he misses his foot.
Section 5 - The Holding Pens, the Massacre
The team’s primary objective is completed. New orders arrive: prisoner holding pens, extremely urgent. They’re low on ammunition - 124 rounds between Kirin, and the rest even lower. Corval weighs “extremely urgent” against going back for Simeon’s team’s weapons. There is no choice that isn’t a cost.
They cut through the fence and reach the pens in under two minutes. Hundreds of gray canvas tents in rows, each with a bronze metal loop set into the ground in front of it, each loop with four or five people - civilians of Lireba system - kneeling before it, necks tethered in plastic short enough to prevent standing, hands secured behind their backs. Four aliens are moving down the rows cutting throats. A hundred are already still, their blood running together into a single spreading pool.
The team goes in. Kirin expends his last rounds unzipping a cuttlefish-like alien from middle to head-top. Then he drops the empty rifle and charges with his fists. The monofilament blade of the metal cylinder alien opens him from his left side almost to the hip bone. He doesn’t feel it. The suit seals the damage. He and Corval ram the metal alien together and Corval empties his sidearm into it through a gap in its casing. Something in orbit flares bright as a second sun, fades red, and vanishes.
The survivors that remain alive free each other from the tether loops. They turn to the livesuit soldiers. And then they are cheering. A third of the camp is dead clay and thickening blood. Simeon and Hamze and Jones are dead. And the people who are still alive are cheering.
They were heroes. They were gods. Their wounds, their losses, their damage were all covered by the suit.
Kirin lifts his fist. The cheers grow louder.
Section 6 - New Team Members, Old Names Blocked
Three days after Smith, Santos, and Michah join the team, they receive orders: brane-slip to Abalam system. Kirin tries to look up Corval, Ross, Noor - the data requests come back with errors. Reassigned team members are data-blocked during the cooldown period. He’d known they would be. He’d hoped someone might have overlooked the block this time.
His missing foot aches with a phantom cramp. The toes he doesn’t have anymore curl and point. He lies in the dark and listens to Gleaner talking with the new people about best meals, back when they’d been the sort of organisms that ate.
Section 7 - The Medbay Scan: Kirin’s Leg
Kirin goes to the medbay for phantom limb treatment. The scanner works from head down. The familiar landscape of his body: old injuries, scars, the black vertebrae that have already been replaced. He knows the map. He has had versions of this scan many times.
His left leg: the blue of living tissue ends above his left knee. Below, a swirl of black threads spiraling up through the thigh like a whirlpool - the suit material in the process of replacing what remains. He thinks he’d have noticed when big pieces of his body went away. Apparently not. The suit handled it. That’s what the suit does.
He asks it to stimulate the phantom nerves in the missing foot. He tries not to move while the scanner restarts.
Section 8 - Piotr Comes to the Medbay
Piotr sits beside him on a stool. They’ve served together a long time. There’s an old joke between them - something about beer, the open sky, you beside me whistling in the darkness. Kirin says the first half and waits. Piotr types out, through the suit’s text channel: You’ll have to remind me. It’s been a lot of time.
Something cold settles in Kirin’s stomach. Piotr doesn’t remember the second half of the joke. He starts talking. Keeps talking. While he talks, he guides Piotr gently onto the scanner’s bed, keeps the flow of words going so Piotr doesn’t move, and releases the pause on the scan.
The scanner works down from the crown of Piotr’s head.
Blackness. Blackness. Blackness.
At the jaw: a little swatch of blue. A length of bone. Three recognizable teeth. Then a little more at the lower jaw. By the throat: mostly blue and white, with only a scaffolding of black lacing through. Below the throat: the proportion inverts. By the time the scan reaches his torso, the blue is scaffolding. The black is the structure.
Kirin turns off the scanner. What had been Piotr is black and sculpted. Sightless. The suit has replaced him the way minerals replace organic matter in petrified wood. The text arriving in his private channel - I love you, man. More than that, I trust you to do the right thing - is the suit, operating the preserved pattern of a dead man’s personality.
How long have you been dead? How long had it hurt? Was it all at once, or did it fill in slowly over time? Did you know it was happening?
Section 9 - The Silence Kirin Keeps
What would happen if he said it out loud? Would they send in the censors? Would his own suit flood him with poison? And how would anyone know if he was dead? Would he?
These suits were never made to come off. The soldiers are too woven together with them now. The reenlistment bonuses, the morale systems, the choice prompts - it was lies. It was all lies. We’re an army of the dead.
Kirin could say all of this. It’s right there.
“They just keep upping the bonuses until we stay,” Kirin says.
I’d do it for free, though, the suit sends back in Piotr’s voice. It’s worth it just being the good guys.
“Yeah,” Kirin says. “Me too.”
He asks Piotr to go bond with the new team members. In the open channel, Gleaner laughs and one of the new ones says something about being misunderstood. Kirin stays in the medbay a moment longer. His missing foot flexes, ghost toes pointing in a cramp that has nowhere to be. He doesn’t ask for a drug to stop it.
He will go to Abalam system. He will fight whatever is waiting there. The things he has to do next haven’t changed. He just knows more now about what he’s become.
What This Story Does
Livesuit is a body-horror story wearing combat fatigues. The war against the Carryx produces exactly this kind of soldier: permanently bonded, perpetually capable, incrementally posthuman. The suits work. They save lives - the prisoners at Lireba system are alive because of them. The cost is the soldiers inside.
The story doesn’t ask whether it’s worth it. Kirin doesn’t ask. The question has been swallowed by the suit. What remains is the mission, the team, the next brane-slip, the next objective. What remains is the small persistence of Kirin noticing that Piotr doesn’t remember a joke they’ve shared for years, and deciding that the knowledge is more dangerous spoken than kept. The army of the dead keeps fighting because no one knows they’re dead, including them.
All content belongs to its respective author and publisher. These are personal reading notes.